Tired of finding, copying and pasting data into spreadsheets? With just a few lines of code, you can set up a self-updating spreadsheet in Google Docs that fetches and stores data for you, as this Facebook example shows.

Let your spreadsheet do the work

Tracking basic data in a spreadsheet is pretty simple -- it's remembering to update your data each day, week or month that can be a problem. But why update manually when you can take advantage of some simple automation tools?

Here's a step-by-step guide to creating an automatically updating Google spreadsheet to track data. We'll use "number of Facebook followers" in this example, but the code can be easily updated to fetch and store other data as well.